This section exists to provide an anchor for meta-discussions about the manual itself; things which need to be hashed out, but not in-line where they'll confuse readers.

This section exists to provide an anchor for meta-discussions about the manual itself; things which need to be hashed out, but not in-line where they'll confuse readers.

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I hope that this branch of the wiki will pick up a following, and that everyone will Just Dive In making changes, like folks do over at [http://www.wikipedia.com Wikipedia]... and that I dont offend anyone by hanging out here a lot myself and trying to polish up English and suchlike. :-}

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I hope that this branch of the wiki will pick up a following, and that everyone will Just Dive In making changes, like folks do over at [http://www.wikipedia.com Wikipedia]... and that I don't offend anyone by hanging out here a lot myself and trying to polish up English and suchlike. :-}

Revision as of 19:04, 10 October 2010

This page is up-to-date to MythTV version 0.20, the current release is 29.0

Following you'll find a list of guidelines for writing/maintaining the manual. These are here to help the manual stay organized.

Don't use hyperlinks - The manual should be readable without the need for hyperjumps. If you want to inform users about urls, write them out out completely so it stays usable in printed form as wel.

Not everyone is a Linux geek - Remember you have more expertise than most readers; keep it simple and avoid technical jargon. Technical solutions can be added to the chaptergroup for advanced users.

Mark/date things - Comments should be dated and marked with version numbers -- particularly things like "It doesn't do X (yet)." or "Y is supposed to work, but doesn't."

Accuracy, currency, and clarity are essential for documentation, precisely so that readers can evaluate what they read, in case a branch is less up-to-date than it should be.

Screenshots

If you want to do screenshots of live TV you must turn off XV video acceleration; you can use the following command to run Mythfrontend.

$ NO_XV=1 mythfrontend

This does software rendering of the video stream, so it is slow. To slightly improve speed, make sure you don't have any deinterlacing turned on.

Todo

This section exists to provide an anchor for meta-discussions about the manual itself; things which need to be hashed out, but not in-line where they'll confuse readers.

I hope that this branch of the wiki will pick up a following, and that everyone will Just Dive In making changes, like folks do over at Wikipedia... and that I don't offend anyone by hanging out here a lot myself and trying to polish up English and suchlike. :-}

Sub Page Protocol

Over the next day or so, I'll be moving these pages to subpages, where I should have put them in the first place.

And therein lies a story. I'm realizing, as I go along, that putting things on subpages, to avoid cluttering the namespace, has the side effect of making them *much* harder to reference conveniently, which is pretty much the precise purpose of using a Wiki to get the work done in the first place. So, while large chunks of inline text will play well as subpages, smaller self-contained ones which are likely to be cross-referred from other places (like the individual tables in the SQL database reference) probably *should* be independent pages.

It's a pretty rough haul, figuring out how to factor the page/subpage issue; this seems like a good topic for discussion.

Put it here. ;-)

And I've attracted help already. Hey, JDonavan; nice stuff. You don't seem to have a user page yet, so I'll post this here, and hope you note it in recent changes.

JD- The user manual is something I'd hoped to see out of the wiki since it started. Happy to help.